Google’s Fred Algorithm Update – 5 Steps to Take Now!

Google is always tight-lipped about the changes they make to their algorithm, however, the change on March 7th/8th was large enough for many website owners and digital marketing firms to notice substantial changes in traffic and rankings. This new algorithm update, simply known as “Fred”, is believed to primarily target websites with low-quality content and backlinks. Often, these two factors occur simultaneously and on websites that have utilized SEO companies to quickly build low-quality content and backlinks.

Google has confirmed the Fred algorithm update, but they were weary of giving too much information about it. The only clue given to website owners was that Fred targeted websites that were not abiding by the webmaster guidelines. Based on our research here at StatCounter, we have determined that sites with low-quality content and unnatural backlinks, purely meant to drive revenue have been the most hurt by this update.

Here are five things you can do right now to see if you were affected and start recovering any lost rankings and traffic

1) Look at your analytics. Did you see a drop in the traffic or the number of keywords you were ranking for between March 5th and the 20th. If no you are probably fine if you did then read on.

2) See if you can categorize your content into 2 buckets – high quality and updated vs low quality and old.

3) Match your lost keywords, based on traffic volume and previous rankings, with any low-quality content pages.

4) Improve your content quality immediately. Start by adding to, rewriting, and making your low quality pages better. Start with the pages that were driving the most traffic pre-Fred (see number 3).

5) Use a backlink spam tool or checker and to find and remove any questionable backlinks. Also, ensure that your remaining “good” backlinks appear natural and in reasonable ratios. For instance, no-follow to follow ratios, anchor text similarities, etc. are all things that Google takes into account when determining the value of your backlinks.

Fred Algorithm Update Changes and Concerns

The update has now been around long enough for us to start piecing together the puzzle. The first factor is content. If your site’s rankings are heavily dependent on multiple long-tail keywords and the content that matches those keywords was written before 2014, you may have been affected. Basically, if Fred sees your content as invaluable, outdated, or too ad-heavy, you may see some rankings drop.

The second factor is low-quality backlinks. If you’ve ever paid for generic or easy to spot “artificial” backlinks, Fred may have just penalized you. Websites with a lot of old content likely also have a lot of old backlinks. Since low backlinks and low quality content often go hand in hand, this correlation makes it difficult to determine which, if not both factors is driving changes in rankings.

Also, since Google said this update targeted website’s that were not following the webmaster guidelines, you may want to review these as well to ensure you accidently aren’t practicing any black hat or out of date SEO techniques. For the rest of 2017, focus on creating quality content for your website rather than generating large amounts of cheap and quickly written content.

Track Your Traffic with StatCounter

StatCounter offers free website analytics to millions of websites around the world. We also track changes in search engines and keep our members informed with the latest news. If you’d like to start using StatCounter to see how changes like Fred affect your website click here to sign-up.

It’s a shame. I’m owing a simple poor quality site , an e-bokk library in Hungarian. It’s completely free . I think, that Google is not a God, to manipulate traffic data. Speaking clearly: Google has right to manipulate the serach results in the Google-browser, or in Google page-ranks, but the only I want a clear and right real statistics form statcounter … from anyone. This practice completely inapropriate for me.

Targeting poor quality websites with unnatural backlinks. Nothing new here, it’s all part of the core algorithm to weed out such sites.
Of course Google makes lots of changes and tweaks all the time, all towards tightening the detection.
No surprise there.

Every site owner should have a very good idea of their content quality and the existence of their unnatural backlinks. Time to get busy and improve content quality and remove unnatural backlinks.

Luckily i haven’t faced such kind of penalty to my websites. Google is becoming hard and hardest for low quality websites and content so always be with the high in depth quality content which can gain natural links anyway thanks for heads up.

This could be a game changer for me just cleaned up a my site from previous penalties now it looks like I will have to start again. I have seen a drop in traffic within those dates so hopefully I am not caught up in another Google update.

I think I need to go and have a good look at some of my older posts/pages and either add fresh content or combine them to make them larger and more authoritative.

Great question! In our opinion using “noindex” for pages that are already indexed will get most of those pages removed fairly quickly. Since they aren’t brand new pages this is not a 100% foolproof but Google has gotten better at deindexing pages labeled as such. Using “noindex” to remove duplicate content, or content that is essentially discontinued can certainly work. However, there are some things to keep in mind if you go down that path and we’d see it as a last case scenario. Here is why.

Remember that any historical external links pointing to those pages and giving your site “link juice” will no longer be counted. This could be a big deal or a little deal depending on your specific website.

Next, since you still would have internal pages linking to the pages with “noindex” you are essentially giving some of your power to pages that aren’t using it. Again, the impact of this would depend on the number of pages you deindex and overall site structure.

The best course of action and what we would advise is to first be certain you were impacted and certain that you have identified the right problematic content. Next, it is more work but a good clean-up of all your content will put you in a much better position in the long-run for more traffic. We hope it works out for you quickly and thanks again for the great question.